Free online course: All you ever wanted to know about SDN

Georgia Tech this spring will offer a comprehensive free, 6-week online course about software-defined networking, one of the hottest topics in enterprise IT.

The MOOC (massive open online course) is being offered via Coursera and is being led by Nick Feamster, an associate professor at Georgia Techs College of Computing and a participant in past SDN events such as the Open Networking Summit.

(Last year we also wrote about Google, in the wake of Internet blackouts in Egypt and Libya, awarding at least $1 million to Feamster and other Georgia Tech researchers working on tools that will immediately reveal when governments are trying to shut down or censor use of the Internet.)

The free SDN course starts on May 27th and will entail roughly 6-8 hours of work per week. You should know Python and have taken at least a basic networking course.

In a nutshell, heres the SDN course focus:

This course introduces software defined networking, an emerging paradigm in computer networking that allows a logically centralized software program to control the behavior of an entire network.

Separating a network's control logic from the underlying physical routers and switches that forward traffic allows network operators to write high-level control programs that specify the behavior of an entire network, in contrast to conventional networks, whereby network operators must codify functionality in terms of low-level device configuration.

Logically centralized network control makes it possible for operators to specify more complex tasks that involve integrating many disjoint network functions (e.g., security, resource control, prioritization) into a single control framework, allowing network operators to create more sophisticated policies, and making network configurations easier to configure, manage, troubleshoot, and debug.

The course stretches back to the 1980s and AT&Ts Network Control Point and finishes with a section on SDN in data centers, wireless and enterprise environments.

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